


Hunter's Hitters

by Dark_Eyed_Junco



Category: Baseball RPF
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Divorce, Kid Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-13
Packaged: 2019-02-14 13:59:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13009335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dark_Eyed_Junco/pseuds/Dark_Eyed_Junco
Summary: I'm going to tell you one thing, and you get it straight. No son of mine should be hitting off a tee.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the video spoof which made me imagine a real camp where Hunter teaches his funky mechanics to a bunch of kids. Originally it was going to be ~hilarious~, but later I added Buster and a lil romance because this is who I am as a person. Also I think their dynamic is funny, plus I needed manic dream pixie Hunter Pence in my life and aesthetically I thought they would be nice together (at least when Hunter still had short hair).
> 
> The concept ended up more ambitious than I had enthusiasm for the guys, probably, and then I was like there is already way too much about San Jose in here so I can’t keep padding things out with that and the kids were going to have to have a really strong role + some lingering RPF unease about the combination of divorce and spouses and children (albeit fictional) ended up tanking my motivation. I do like the beginning and the idea in theory though.

Baseball players grow best in the sun. Mild winters; hot summers; heat that comes off the ground in waves and sweat that creeps down a cheek in beads. And no rain unless it's the storming kind, a charge in the air and lightning quick, threatening in the evening when the light's dying and no one can see the ball well enough to glove it anyway, or get a bat around it. In the morning the sun rises and bakes the infield dry – though not too dry, a hard infield is a bastard to slide on – and then everyone begins again.

So, Florida. Texas. (Hunter is from Arlington. Oil family.) The red clay of Georgia. Southern California. Northern California too, even if the Bay does roll out layers of chill and fog that thicken with each degree latitude further from the Equator, and one day Hunter gets a call from an old coach from his UTA days saying, “Hey, Hunter, listen, listen. Summer camp, San Jose. I need another instructor. Interested?”

And why not?

**

A few years back he'd actually been in the Bay Area, followed a now former girlfriend to San Francisco – well, SF-adjacent: they'd rented a place in Oakland and she'd commuted via BART to the science museum where she worked. The last time he'd been in San Jose might have been their day at Great America, or it might have been another trip after. Hard to remember. San Jose might pretend to be a big city, and maybe it even is one, but parts of it more closely resemble an overgrown suburb.

And it doesn't look like things have picked up, at least on his way from the airport over to where he's staying in West San Jose. More cars, but still fundamentally sleepy. Kind of boring, to be honest. The camp is being held on the baseball fields of De Anza College, which is actually in Cupertino, based off of the brick CITY OF CUPERTINO sign Hunter passes on the meridian, and also how the design of the street name signs shifts. Nothing much else changes.

There is a lot of construction that Hunter can see, going on in a fenced off lot with some tree cover. A very big lot. Plus, traffic is terrible. “Apple's new campus,” says Paul, when Hunter asks. (Paul was his assistant coach at UTA. Now he works for San Jose State.) “Go ahead and take the younger kids to the field? I need the batting cages for my group.” He pinches the bridge of his nose. “The parents are already giving it to me. Christ. Varsity this. Fall ball that. Fucking, travel team tryouts in September. Their stress is giving _me_ ulcers.”

“What ever happened to good old Little League?” asks Hunter. He puts his right cleat up against the side of a nearby trash can and reaches down to lock his laces tight. The question is rhetorical. He knows what the answer is – parents are willing to shell out the big bucks to secure year-round baseball for their mini-Jeter. Better coaching and stiffer competition, standing in against young boys burning down their arms all year long with high heat.

Hunter never did travel ball. Oil business is boom and bust. His family could barely even afford batting time – at least how much batting time he had wanted, which was a lot –and he keeps with him the memory of that one summer he spent hanging around the local batting cage, just watching, until the owner took pity on him. Great guy.

“Hah, Little League,” says Paul. He shakes his head. “No, no, I won't complain. Without parental anxiety, forget about charging 750 a head a week.”

Camp is structured as a day long affair, 9 to 4. Lunch is not provided. There are three divisions – older boys for Paul, kids for Hunter, and softball for Susan, who played at Long Beach State. She picks up most of the girls, but Hunter gets a few of the younger ones who haven't been leaned on to swap over yet. For instance, Ellen. She comes with her brother, Elliot, both fair haired and fair skinned. Very sweet; flush of red color in their cheeks; eleven-ish. Ellen is taller and more mature, but Hunter suspects they're twins and there's a staggered puberty thing going on. She's also a better player than Elliot, who can be a little spacey and also seems to have a few hangups about the sport. Yips, maybe. Hunter will work on him.

On the first day, their mother had asked Ellen if she preferred softball or baseball, and she'd opened her mouth and made the beginning of a s- sound, but then Elliot had looked at her and she had changed her answer. Which is why Hunter thinks they're twins. (That, and the names.) Some kind of non-verbal communication going on there. But sure, they want to stick together. Their mother drops them off every morning and picks them up in the afternoon. No problems on that front.

A week in, Hunter has an angry father breathing down his neck.

**

It goes like this: it's around 7. The sun is busy setting. The air feels muggy and makes it hard to cool off, and the fact that the temps drop quick at night isn't much consolation for the collar of the shirt he's sweat through, or the many sticks of deodorant the summer has already claimed. He's holed up with Susan in the side offices of the local batting cages they've rented all their equipment from – De Anza only providing the fields and not wanting them to muck around the rest of their facilities, such as they are – doing attendance and billing admin for the first week wrap-up when a man knocks on the window by their door.

“No,” says Hunter. “You want the front desk, how did you even get back here?” He motions for the man to return the way he came.

The man does not leave. He knocks again.

“We're not affiliated with Dickey's.”

“I need to talk to you,” says the man, his face up to the glass, blurred through two layers of dust, one on each side.

“We don't sell any tokens here!” Hunter waves his hands, no, no, like he's putting up a stop sign on a throw.

“For God's sake,” says Susan. She stands up and opens the door, the knob turning with a sharp clack.

The man walks in. He's a clean cut sort of guy, athletic build, handsome in a well-tailored suit Hunter can't even be sure of the right color name for – Greyish? Or brown? Biege, maybe? – and a dark blue tie, East Coast flavor. Not many people dress like this on the regular out here. Maybe he works in the Financial District, and for a bank or a law firm. Not a techie. “Are you Mr. Pence?” he asks.

“Yeah, hi.” So the guy isn't lost. “Can I help you?”

“I'm here about one of my kids. Elliot?”

“Oh, you're Elliot's father.” Hunter orders his thoughts for a second. Elliot, Elliot. What good is there to say about Elliot? “Well, his confidence is definitely improving.” Hunter ventures a smile.

The man frowns in reply. “He tells me you've got him hitting off a tee. He's way too old for that.”

Oh. One of these dads. The smile starts to wilt off Hunter's face; he looks to Sarah for some moral support, then back again. “Well, but. He's starting to hit the ball real well. Uh, off the tee. That's why his confidence is improving.”

“Hey.” Elliot's dad leans in, puts his fists on the table. Joints on wood. Hunter should have had him sit down. “I'm going to tell you one thing, and you get it straight. No son of mine should be hitting off a tee. What the hell am I paying you for?”

Hunter swallows his first response, then his second. His Adam's apple goes up and down, working overtime stuffing what he really wants to say down into his stomach. Customer service. Two kids bringing in a thousand bucks a week. “Okay,” he says, in as mild a tone as he can manage. “Mister – Posey, is it? I'll have him hitting without the tee next week. If there's nothing else?” He stands up and comes around the desk.

Posey quick blinks, once, taking in Hunter's overall physical presence. His combativeness dials down maybe half a notch, and he lets Hunter guide him towards the door. (This works in bars, too.) “Well, good,” he says, sounding at least partially mollified. “But he also showed me this, uh, I don't even know how to describe it. This throw, like?” He stops for a second and demonstrates for Hunter, arm snapping through the motion. “Like he doesn't have an elbow?”

From behind them, Susan masks a giggle into a cough. “Did he?” asks Hunter, likewise fighting to keep a smile off his lips. His cheek twitches. “I'll be sure to look into that too. Just give me a week. I promise you won't be disappointed.”

“Well, uh, alright. Um. A week. Okay. Thanks, Mr. Pence.” And he's out the door.

Hunter goes back to his desk and sits, heavily. The papers he was working on flutter. “Fuck,” he says. “What an asshole.”

“I told you not to show that throwing motion of yours to the kids.”

“Hey, I only did it once. As a joke. Everyone laughed.”

“I didn't see Mr. Posey laughing.” She signs something with a flourish, jagged movements of her hand and the blue back of her pen cutting through the air. Then she pushes her seat back. “All finished here.”

The minute hand is edging past the 6. “I'm almost done, I'm almost done. Give me ten minutes.”

“Okay.” She stands, stretches. “Too bad he's an asshole, though. He's pretty cute.”

“Tch,” says Hunter, not agreeing or disagreeing. Just tching.

“What? You don't think so?”

“Maybe. But also taken,” he reminds her.

“The mother never wears a ring. You never noticed? He wasn't either, just now.”

“No,” says Hunter. “I did not notice. That's not the kind of thing I notice. What's next? Are you going to tell me what color his eyes are?”

“God,” she says. “Men.”

Hunter shakes his head at her.

**

On Monday, he takes Elliot off the tee. The boy is not happy about it, but he's too well bred to show anything beyond a hint of frown that furrows a single crease into the middle of his forehead. It's hard to say if he would prefer his sister watch him disgrace himself or not, so to be safe Hunter invents an errand and sends her off to ask Paul a question.

Elliot's stance is as picture perfect as it was one week ago. Everything about him is perfect, actually – he's the platonic ideal of a little ballplayer: helmet, gloves, all the way down to the high socks and cleats his mother dressed him in, pretty cute, and also how he's limbering his bat back and forth in precise, measured motions, like he already has a batting routine down pat.

Hunter waits. Elliot finishes with the bat and sets it against his shoulder. Now he digs in with the toes of his right cleat, rough dirt scrape, over and over and over. Definitely stalling. The sky is a moteless blue this morning. There isn't a cloud in sight. Floating upwards on the wind are the steady pinging vibrations of aluminum bats smacking baseballs. “You ready?” asks Hunter.

Elliot squints, shrugs. Hunter tosses the ball, easy, proper overhand form, no trouble for the ol' arm because there's no effort behind the throw. The ball travels the 40 or so feet at a leisurely pace, and Elliot bails out a full half-second before it reaches him. The bat goes straight into the grass; the boy flinches away. As for the ball, it sails harmlessly right through what had been Elliot's sweet spot and thumps into the backstop.

Same thing that happened last week, Day One of camp. Identical play-by-play. Hunter had exercised tact then and brought out the tee, but today they're all laboring underneath new time constraints. He approaches his pupil. “Scared of the ball, huh?” he says, trying to sound offhand.

The ball rolled a ways in the dirt after bouncing off the chain-links of the backstop, and Elliot steps on it now, balancing it in short circles underneath the arch of his foot. He doesn't meet Hunter's eyes, but he does nod.

“Been hit before?”

“No.”

“Okay, hmm. Have you tried – not being afraid of the ball?”

That earns him the most withering look he's ever seen out of an eleven year old. Maybe not so well-bred, then. For a second Elliot looks more like his father than Hunter is entirely comfortable with. Elliot takes his foot off the ball. “Did my dad talk to you?”

There doesn't seem to be any harm in admitting this. Hunter nods.

“He's a gay now, you know. It started last year.”

“Uh.” Wow. Hunter coughs. “That's, uhh.” Good to know? But irrelevant? None of Hunter’s business?

Elliot narrows his eyes. “You got a problem with that?”

“No, but should you be telling everyone? Is your dad okay with that?” Other issues – such as the use of the article 'a' in front of gay and a mistaken notion about the duration of his father's homosexuality – are beyond the scope of Hunter's mandate.

“I'm not telling everyone, I'm only telling you.”

It's tough, trying to follow this kid-logic. “And why's that?”

He sighs. “Dad was teaching me baseball. It wasn't going great, so we took a break and tried swimming instead. That was fine, until I almost drowned – long story. Anyway, he got scared and decided to do baseball again. It went okay. Not great – that's what he said. But then he turned gay and we only see him on weekends, and now I'm afraid of the ball.” He looks at Hunter, expectantly.

Is Hunter supposed to do something with his information? He is not a sports psychologist. Or any kind of psychologist. Child psychologist. “O - kay,” he says, off-balance, trying to feel his way back onto firm conversational footing. “But this is a baseball camp.”

Elliot sighs, again. He's very good at that. Now he looks older than his years, like a soldier, a veteran of a hundred battles. Except dressed as a baseball player. His eyes slide past Hunter's face, sideway, across the field. Hunter turns and sees Ellen watching them. The brim of her cap is shading her eyes, and she's tucking stray strands of her hair behind her ears, but she's definitely watching.

One more sigh from Elliot, for good measure, maybe. He stoops to pick up the ball. A puff of dirt kicks up into dust. The ball looks outsized, taking up a lot of real estate against the crooked lines of his small palm, but Elliot runs through grips with the same precision that characterized his batting routine. Four-seamer, two-seamer, something that went by too fast but by elimination was probably a changeup. “Let's play catch, then,” says the boy. “Mr. Pence.”

**

At the end of the day, he remembers almost too late that he needs to keep an eye out for Elliot's mother so that they can have a chat. There's kids and equipment to keep track of, lots of moving parts – don't want anything or anyone to get lost in the shuffle – and he ends up sprinting to the parking lot to stop her before she leaves the campus.

It's better like this, because the kids have already run ahead to the car, an expensive looking sedan with clean lines. Maybe a Tesla. He’s never seen so many Tesla’s before in his life. “Mrs, uh, Ms, Posey?” he calls, stumbling over how to address her; he's not even sure what name she goes by.

But she doesn't correct him. “Yes? Is something wrong.”

“About your son - ”

“Oh,” she says, smiling faintly. She looks towards the car at the child in question; she's wearing a single earring, silver and large but not too intricate, hanging down the left side of her face. “Don't worry about him. I'm really only bringing them out here so they don't spend all summer glued to a computer screen.” She takes a step away.

“Um.” He half extends his arm, not wanting to let her go yet, but not sure how best to bring up the subject. “Er -”

“What is it?” She tucks a strand of hair beneath her ear, a gesture Hunter recognizes from her daughter. Something occurs to her; she sighs. “Did Buster come talk to you?”

Hunter nods.

“According to Buster, every American boy needs to know how to ride a bike, shoot a gun, and hit a ball.” Her tone is very even but manages to convey a fraction of disagreement nonetheless.

“Ah?” Hunter does actually kind of agree with that, in principle. Maybe not the shooting part.

“But we,” there's a sharp cut to the word, we, “decided that the way he was going about it was – unproductive. So we're sending Elliot to your camp now. Please don't worry about it, just do your best.”

“Well,” he tries, sensing that she's about to dismiss him again, “Sorry, I know it's none of my business, but Elliot said a few things to me about the source of his. Problems. And I wonder if he might have – abandonment? Issues?”

“Mr. Pence, do you have children?”

“Well, no, just, if we're serious about solving his problems, I thought maybe you two could have a talk with him?”

“That's a great idea,” she says. Her smile is polite and doesn't come close to reaching her eyes. “Maybe we'll do that. See you next week, Mr. Pence.”

**

“You think I shouldn't have mentioned it.”

“You had good intentions, but guess what? No one wants to have their divorce brought up by their summer baseball coach.”

“Fuck, I really shouldn't have mentioned it.”

“Not everyone cares as much about a child's ability to play baseball as we do, Hunter.”

“What a waste.” He sighs and lets the feet of his chair drop to Earth. “That sweet swing.” As long as there aren't any moving balls within three feet of him. “I haven't gotten anywhere with him. He can hit all day off a tee, though.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First attempt at a beginning. It reads too preachy so I discarded most of it and redid the intro. I remember there being some San Jose stuff in here I ended up cannibalizing for another fic but now I can’t find it so either I dreamed it or I took it out in case I ever did end up finishing this one.

Or so Hunter tells himself anyway, a justification and an explanation for the still somewhat inexplicable course of his life – here, South Bay, a business offering batting cages (25 dollars for 200 pitches), grass fields and infield diamonds, green dugout benches and chain-link fences, a nice, neat little grounds that betrays no sign of the current desperate struggle of keeping a single nostril above the rising tide of property values.

Median home price in San Jose has hit 1 million. Not great for a newcomer.

Summer is their busiest season. School is out. They hold as many as six different camps simultaneously – several age ranges, boys, girls, softball, T-ball, and to accommodate all this baseball they spread out into the vacant fields of the local high school in their backyard and, sometimes, into a municipal field complex, though that's farther away and down the street. Lots of little boys and girls, mostly white and Latino and some Asian, but not many Indians, who play their own batting sport. (Hunter sees them sometimes, in Cupertino by the library, or going down El Camino in Palo Alto, on the Stanford fields. Very sharp; trousers, cricket whites.)

Camps can be ordered in a few different flavors. Morning-only; afternoon-only; full day, 9 to 4. (Lunch not provided.) Two weeks of full-day will set you back a round one thousand dollars. But these are mainly children of privilege, children of extracurricular, raised by well-meaning men and women who believe an empty summer is a wasted one. Maybe there's no school this time of year, but there's always a way to find another type of classroom.

Some have athletic aspirations for their kids – to help hook them Hunter tells them he employs several travel team coaches, who always have an eye-out for recruiting and bring with them as credentials a laundry list of success stories. So many national letters of intent for college teams. So many MLB draft picks. A first rounder here. A second rounder there.

Other parents couldn't care less. They'd prefer their kid to be an engineer. Or a doctor. But the kid needs the appearance of being well-rounded for college apps, and who wants to be stuck in junior varsity? The common theme here is: it's not often the kid's personal feelings are taken into consideration.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Three odds and ends I had tacked to the end of the word doc - 
> 
> This one is definitely gray and not – tan, or whatever that first one was.
> 
> I don’t know why I felt this strongly about describing Buster’s suits. He was going to be some sort of finance person, a banker in SF or a lawyer in Palo Alto doing mergers or something. Hunter was going to stare at Buster’s face for a long time trying to figure out what color his eyes are their second meeting too. 
> 
> **
> 
> Are you calling my son a dog?
> 
> Hunter was going to relay some anecdote about a roommate’s dog separation anxiety behaviors after the roommate left to go on a trip for two weeks to an incredulous Buster. 
> 
> **
> 
> Mr. Pence, are you dating my dad?  
> I’m not at liberty to say.  
> What does that mean?  
> It means ask your father.
> 
> Typical kidfic conversation, I think.


End file.
